Frank Doster

• Frank Doster
• Born: January 19, 1847
• Died: Febru-ary 25, 1933

Populist lawyer, orator, and politician, was born near Winchester, Virginia, the youngest of three sons of Alfred Doster, whose grandfather had emigrated from W rttemberg, Germany, in 1717, and Rachel (Doyle) Doster. In 1848 the family moved to Indiana. Both of Doster’s brothers were killed in the Civil War. Doster himself enlisted twice— the first time, when he was fourteen, to help drive John Hunt Morgan’s raiders out of Indiana; the second, when he was seventeen, to fight with the Indiana Cavalry, which was sent to intimidate American Indian tribes in Kansas.

After being mustered out late in 1865, Doster returned to Indiana and enrolled in Thornton Academy, where John Clark Ridpath, later a popular historian and supporter of radical causes, was one of his teachers. After attending Indiana University and the Benton Law Institute, he moved to Monticello, Illinois, to read law and was admitted to the bar in 1870. In July 1870 he married Caroline Riddle of Monticello. They had seven children: Lenore (born in 1871); Chase (born in 1873); Wade (born in 1880); John (born in 1889); Irma (born in 1893); and two sons who died in infancy.

In 1871 Doster and his wife settled in Marion, Kansas, a small town in the south-central part of the state. Doster was elected to the state legislature and took his seat in January 1872, at twenty-six the youngest member of the assembly. Over the next few years, during the course of several unsuccessful campaigns for elective office, Doster became well known among Kansas Republicans as a champion of agrarian reform. In 1878 he delivered a Fourth of July speech on the subject of inequality, citing numerous examples in the United States and pointing out that the Paris Commune insurrection of 1871 had been the inevitable result of governmental neglect of the people. The next day he accepted the nomination of the Greenback party for state attorney general. Shortly afterward, the Greenbackers also nominated him for Congress. Neither race was successful.

Believing that the Greenback cause had lost its vitality, Doster allied himself with the Union Labor party, which was trying to unite wage earners and farmers. In 1879 he and his wife joined the National Liberal League, an organization opposed to Bible reading in schools, public support of sectarian institutions, and state recognition of religious holidays.

Doster, who was known as a cold, reserved man, was politically quiescent during the early and middle 1880s; he maintained a busy law practice and was active in the Union Army veterans’ organization. His oratory on public occasions, for which he was much in demand, tended toward the jingoistic. He was an active buyer of real estate and a participant in schemes to make Marion an industrial and recreational center.

When the Kansas judiciary was reorganized in 1887, Doster was appointed, and later elected district judge. He ran for reelection in 1891 and in May of that year delivered an important speech in which he emphasized the world wide causes of the depression that was then under way, illustrated the ways in which social injustice makes a mockery of legal equality, and dismissed the remedies proposed by Edward Bellamy, Henry George, Leo Tolstoy, and other reformers as mere palliatives predicated on “no just conception of the disease which affects the body politic.” This disease, said Doster, was the myth of the mutuality of capital and labor. The most famous portion of the speech, often cited by his opponents as evidence of his radicalism was his statement that “the rights of the user are paramount to those of the owner.” The technological revolution, as in the case of railroads, had made recognition of this fact even more imperative.

This address added to Doster’s reputation as “the Daniel Webster of the People’s party” and it marked his emergence as a leading Populist intellectual. He published an article in October 1892 in the Kansas literary periodical Agora, drawing on Karl Marx, Herbert Spencer, John Fiske, and Elisha Mulford to support his contention that government should become a positive instrument to advance equality and brotherhood.

Although not a candidate, Doster was prominent in the state Populist campaign of 1892, which, although it resulted in a sweep of elective offices, did not capture the lower house of the legislature. Amid charges and counter charges of voting irregularities, both the Populists and the Republicans claimed victory and organized the house. The Populists barricaded themselves in the legislative chamber, the Republicans broke in with sledgehammers, and the Populist governor called out the National Guard to restore order. One result of all the confusion was that Doster, widely believed to be the governor’s éminence grise, lost any chance he had of being elected to the U.S. Senate by the state legislature

Doster’s chief contribution to the Populist, party in its heyday (1892-96) was as an orator and theoretician who could usually be depended on to take the high ground. When some politicians opposed a woman-suffrage plank for fear of losing the votes of German and Irish immigrants who believed that women would support prohibition, Doster replied that principle was more important than ethnic considerations. In a speech delivered in Topeka on Labor Day in 1894 he denounced the exploitation of American laborers by profiteering industrialists, encouraged the Populists “to bring the power of the social masses to bear on the rebellious individuals who thus menace the peace and safety of the state,” and offered two philosophical bases for a just political system: “One that it is the business of the government to do that for the individual which he can not successfully do for himself, and which other individuals will not do for him upon just and equitable terms; the other, that the industrial system of a nation, like its political system, should be a government of and for and by the people alone.”

As a delegate to the national convention of the People’s party at St. Louis in 1896, Doster supported the nomination, engineered by the fusionist wing, of the Democrat William Jennings Bryan for president and seconded the nomination of Thomas E. Watson for vice president. At the state convention Doster was unanimously nominated for chief justice of the Kansas Supreme Court, and he thrilled the audience with his acceptance speech, in which he pledged to serve “the interests of the common people.” His opponents denounced him as a socialist and an anarchist. William Allen White, in his famous Emporia Gazette editorial “What’s the Matter with Kansa,” called him “a shabby, wild-eyed, rattle-brained fanatic.” Doster nevertheless won the election, with the support of the Democratic and Silver Republican endorsements.

As chief justice, Doster sought to improve the quality of Kansas judicial decision—which, he pointed out, were cited less and reversed more than those in most other states —and to promote the concept of judicial restraint. He was a life-long opponent of the doctrine of judicial review, which he believed the Founding Fathers neither desired nor anticipated.

In 1902 he received one of the three nomination to the Kansa Supreme court allocated to the Populists, but he lost the election and left the bench in 1903. He stayed on in Topeka as partner in a law firm, with the Missouri Pacific Railroad as one of his clients, and he became an attorney and promoter for the Denver, Laramie & North western Railroad in 1910.

As a Democrat, in 1914 Doster made a last halfhearted bid for public office, running a poor third in the primary race for the U.S. Senate. The following year the Dsters moved to California for the health of their eldest daughter, who had contracted tuberculosis. She died in 1919. Soon afterward their son Wade, an army medical officer, was killed by his common-law wife. Doster journeyed to New Mexico to assist in the prosecution, and after the woman’s conviction he successfully entered a plea for mercy.

During the last twelve years of his life Doster lived in Topeka, where he became a prominent spokesman for the 1920s brand of liberalism. He advocated American membership in the League of Nations and the World Court and refused to support the presidential candidacy of Robert M. La Follette on the Progressive ticket in 1924 because of La Follette’s isolationism. Doster denounced the Republicans for their equivocal position on child labor, religious fundamentalists for their intolerance of other viewpoints, and prohibition, on which he wrote articles for the November 1927 and July 1928 issues of Plain Talk. He became an active Unitarian, declaring, “I am a communist in economic belief. . . . Let us accept God’s plan for living with one another, not off one another.” After his retirement from his law practice, he continued to counsel indigents.

Doster died of a stroke at the age of eighty-six.

Doster’s papers are in the library of the University of Kansas; most of them date from the 1920s. In addition to the works mentioned in the text, Doster wrote “The Eleventh Indiana Cavalry in Kansas in 1865,” Collections of the Kansas State Historical Society (1919-22). J. C. Malin, A Concern About Humanity: Notes on Reform, 1872-1912 (1964) is a useful corrective to stereotypes of populism and contains a biographical section on Frank and Caroline Doster. M. J. Brodhead, Persevering Populist: The Life of Frank Doster (1969), is a good full-length study.